Friday, October 27, 2006

My last hang glider flight was on Saturday the 14th October 2006. The forecast for the day was light winds straight down the runway, with clear skies overhead. I was thus looking forward to increasing my number of flights, so far I had 10, 7 from my independance day visit, and 3 from a visit a week later.

I also was planning to take some hang glider video footage of me flying, so I was bringing along a cameraperson to capture the moments on video.

By the time I had got my 2 children that were going with me ready, picked up the cameraperson, it was past 1:00pm in the afternoon, thus I didn't get to the airfield till 3:30pm. On arrival at the airfield, the weather was not quite as forecast, the weather people got everything right, except it was very overcast, which meant no thermals for the advanced pilots, and there were quite a lot of pilots that turned out that day, so it was taking long for everyone to get a hang glider flight.

It was almost 4:30 pm before I finished rigging the hang glider, checked it out and it was my turn to fly. The launch was pretty un-eventul, I enjoyed the short flight but ended up landing slightly crosswind, and on the wrong side of the field, so my cameraperson missed the landing.

After waiting for another 30 minutes or so, it was time for my second hang gliding flight, I launched, as the winch pulled me up in the sky, I released one of the lines attached to the glider, so I could get higher, but both lines gave way! I wasn't high enough to do a circuit, so I just landed at the other end of the runway. It was getting dark now due to the heavy cloud cover, so I knew it was time to call it a day. I was disappointed, as I had only managed one decent flight. I just hoped I had enough video footage to put together a nice film for the BBC.

A few days later, I was able to review the footage, and put together a short film about my hang gliding activities which I submitted to the BBC, so the day was not totally wasted. I'm also putting together a different film, also about hang gliding which I will submit to a US TV station.

A copy of the video I submitted to the BBC is on YouTube, you can view it below.

For those of you that don't have access to YouTube, try the version posted to Google.